Shining through US president Donald Trump’s confused aims in the Iran war is Binyamin Netanyahu’s long and consistent policy to assert Israel’s military dominance in the Middle East by destroying Iran’s military capacity, political leadership and state infrastructure. However this war ends, that outcome seems to have been achieved, despite its many attendant catastrophes.
Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Netanyahu and those who share his version of Zionism have prioritised this intransigent approach. That is partly because the previous monarchist regime co-operated closely with Israel on intelligence, agriculture, construction and trade. That relationship under the Shah is a template for Netanyahu about a potential, mutually beneficial, future “normalisation” in the region. This would be based on Israeli military dominance, United States hegemony and expanded economic interdependence. Its foundations in the 2020 Abraham accords during the first Trump presidency were undermined by the 2023 Hamas atrocities in Israel and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza, by Netanyahu’s refusal to contemplate Palestinian statehood and Saudi Arabia’s rejection of co-operation under such conditions.
Netanyahu’s lifelong fixation with Iran is explained by Matthew Gould, a former UK ambassador to Israel (2010-15) who was previously a diplomat in Iran. Netanyahu’s father was a noted historian of anti-Semitism and a fierce opponent of any Israeli territorial compromise. Netanyahu took from him the belief that anti-Semitism is eternal and unchanging, cannot be solved by assimilation or conversion, and requires dominance by the Jewish state.
Netanyahu’s coalition with far-right anti-Palestinian parties since 2022 is the latest in his three-decade domination of Israeli politics. Their conviction that Iran’s regional proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen must be destroyed – along with the regime’s hostile capacity – resonates with the majority of an Israeli public, who strongly support these wars in polling figures. It will certainly help them in forthcoming elections.
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Netanyahu’s links with US politics are intimate and long-standing. He is at the centre of a formidable web of influence, power and wealth mobilised for Israeli support there, many of whose backers supported Trump in 2024 and since then. Foremost among their policy supporters is the Vandenberg Coalition, led by Elliott Abrams, a veteran neoconservative going back to the 1980s, with links to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the premier lobby group which strongly supports the war.
That the war is controversial among Trump’s Maga base is exemplified by Joe Kent’s resignation as director of the US counter-terrorism centre this week. He said the US launched the war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby, and he denied that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat. Irrespective of the precise reasons for its launch, the war’s outcomes so far bear out the overall predominance of Israel’s strategic objective of removing the Iranian threat to its regional power.
That goes back to the Dahiya doctrine, an Israeli military tactic named after the 2006 area in south Beirut, of disproportionate territorial wreckage to undermine enemy leaderships and achieve a sustained deterrent impact. Accounts of the current US-Israeli joint military campaign see it extended from military and leadership targets to productive and now civilian ones in Iran and Lebanon, as in Gaza, putting millions of people in peril and threatening civil wars.
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The compound effects of that strategy are now afflicting the Trump administration much more than the Netanyahu one. So much was unforeseen in the expectation of rapid military successes with unparalleled AI targeting technology – most notably the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian regime’s resilience, based on patriotic-nationalist impulses and civilian disgust, is another effect. The escalating regional disorder is a third, and the spreading political disquiet within Trump’s Maga base and among a Democratic-voting public previously supportive of Israel is yet another.
From a European perspective, the question marks for Nato and transatlantic relations due to the refusal of European leaders so far to heed Trump’s call for support of a US-Israeli war they are not involved in and did not choose are a huge immediate challenge. In the longer term, the bleak prospects of a failed state in Iran, with possible consequences of regional instability in – and mass migration from – the Middle East, could threaten the European integration project itself.
[ Did Trump misjudge Iran’s firepower?Opens in new window ]
Netanyahu’s primordial Zionism is associated with a civilisational philosophy that coincides pretty exactly with that expressed in the Trump administration’s blunt action-focused National Security Strategy. It glorifies white settler colonialism in US history, talks of threatened civilisational erasure in Europe due to migration, and encourages far right parties committed to rolling back political and economic integration.
That challenges European leaders to assert their own interests and values against such a neo-imperial US. Such a stance is part and parcel of the integration project for a post-imperial Europe from the 1950s. Its survival is by no means assured in 2026.
The same goes for the future of Israeli Zionism as defined by Netanyahu’s ideology.
